On our first date, my future husband and I spent a classically sunny-cold San Francisco day walking along the pier, touristing it up a bit even though we lived there. At one point, we ducked into an arcade and found ourselves swept up in a mass of people, all enraptured by the same thing: a tiny, bowl-cut-sporting youngster who was totally shredding on Dance Dance Revolution. He was an awesome sight to behold. Amidst the flashing lights and blaring music and sweaty crowd of gawkers, my date, this boy I liked so much I could barely stand it, reached out and let a tentative hand rest on my back. And then, spooked, he quickly yanked it away.
I asked him later WTF was up with that. He explained that he thought I was bothered by it, that I hadn't really responded to this casual-affectionate touch. He was shy! He didn't know! Girls are weird! Still, despite the brevity of the moment, it was a first step towards something.
I think maybe that's why I sort of connect Dance Dance Revolution with romance*, somehow. Why more products of pop culture don't make better use of the manic-crazy exuberance a Dance Dance Moment can bring, I do not know. But as Twitterpal Sigrid Ellis** reminded me the other day, there's at least one movie that does, and this movie does it SO WELL, I don't know if I can even describe it properly. But here goes.
The movie is Imagine Me & You, with Piper Perabo and Lena Headey as slightly star-crossed lovers. (This was pre-Sarah Connor for Lena, but post-Gossip...did anyone else actually see Gossip? Did you see it in the theater?! I don't really remember why I saw it in the theater. I think I had some severe taste problems in 2000, but one could argue that that hasn't changed a whole lot. As for Piper, if you were put off by the strange performance/vocal intonations in Coyote Ugly -- and I was -- know that she's really adorable here, especially with the British accent.) Geek points are earned thanks to the presence of Anthony Steward Head as Piper's dad and I guess now you could say Matthew "Ozymandias" Goode adds a few as well.
But anyway, the point is, there are various little moments in the movie where you know Piper and Lena are meant to be, and the BEST of those moments, at least as far as I'm concerned, is the scene where they shred on Dance Dance Revolution. They find side-by-side dance pads at the arcade and proceed to perform an obviously pre-choreographed routine and fall in love amidst the 1-2, front-back-left-right, "YOU GUYS RULE"-ness of it all. The beauty of this scene is that, yes, there are lots of things that tend not to happen in reality -- synchronized upper-body movements, lengthy pauses in the routine, etc. -- but it just doesn't matter, because it has that authentic feeling of unbridled Dance Dance-induced joy.
Thankfully, there seem to be a ton of people on YouTube who enjoy this scene as much as I do, so you can check it out for yourself. The best part is when they switch dance pads.
*I guess this is why I included a Dance Dance sequence in my last Grok thing? At the time, I didn't connect it to either that real life moment or the fictitious one in Imagine Me & You, but now...now I see! I'm so transparent.
**Sigrid also writes for one of my favorite new blogs around, the appropriately-named Fantastic Fangirls. If you like good, thoughtful writing about comics, this is for you.
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